There's a very strong connection to Jazz by quite a few SA poets, especially (but not only) of my generation - Seitlhamo Motsapi's poems are full of jazz references; Ari Sitas has written whole cycles of 'musical' poems; it's deep in Berold's early work etc ... RB's 'The Music' has a reference to Koh-i-Noor, that amazing jazz shop that used to exist near Diagonal St in Jhb (does it still?) .....and Hillbrow Records, where Ian Mates used to work, went to Wits with me and got killed in a landmine ambush (he became a journalist) in El Salvador, 1973 - there's a ref to him in Carolyn Forche.

Oh-oh. The reminiscences are starting again.

I had never come across William Matthews before I started to read his jazz poetry. Quite amazing - lines you have to know jazz to get, and even then that no other poet would even dream of, like this one about Bud Powell.....

I'd never seen pain so bland.Smack, though I didn't call it smackin 1959, had eaten his technique.His white-water right hand clatteredmissing runs nobody else would thinkto try, nor think to be outsmartedby. Nobody played as wellas Powell, and neither did he,stalled on his bench between sets,stolid and vague, my hero,his mocha skin souring gray......

Two more very nice poems - Matthews on the 'Buddy Bolden Cylinder', and closer to home Berold's 'Sun ship'. There's a great pocket Everyman called 'Jazz Poems' (ed Kevin Young) that's worth checking out. There are inter alia poems that make the connection to written literature:

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,and so I swung into action and wrote a poem

and it was miserable, for that was how I thoughtpoetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long sincedefunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar ....

...And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew twoother things but as it happened they were wrong.

So I made him look at the poem."There's a lot of that going around", he said....... (Matthews)

but seriously, there is a connection - jazz pushes you towards listening more closely to rhythm, I think, and rhythmic variation: too much SA poetry (myns insiens) still sounds like all the poet has listened to is hymns and marching bands. Good schools have a lot to answer for.

And, because of improvisation, jazz maybe suggests that you push the boundaries of form....